Serendipity, the principle of limited sloppiness, and neural development.

Our first encounter with Antonio García-Bellido was around 1974, when we had just begun our postdoctoral studies in Seymour Benzer's lab. Antonio was spending some time then as a visiting Professor at Ed Lewis' Lab in Caltech. Even for novices like ourselves, we were aware that Antonio had already done important things in Developmental Biology. Just a year earlier, he had published the classic paper on compartments (García-Bellido et al., 1973). As our intention was to study fly neurobiology in Seymour's laboratory, we did not think that Antonio's world and our world had much in common. We certainly had no inklings that Antonio would have a strong influence on our direction many years later. In 1974, fly neurogenetics was far from the mainstream of neurobiology. Perhaps because of that, people who were attracted to Seymour's lab were an eclectic and fairly creative group. We were fortunate to be included in Seymour's group with three other postdocs: Alain Ghysen, Ilan Deak and Yadin Dudai, as well as three graduate students: Don Ready, Bill Harris and Ducan Byer. One small act of Seymour's that turned out to influence us profoundly was his assignment of our benches right next to Alain's bench. One day after a seminar, we were mouthing off our opinions about the seminar with Bill Harris. Alain, who was sitting at the next bench quietly, suddenly spoke up and stunned us by shredding our arguments. From that moment on, we learned to think a little before opening our mouths in his presence. If it were not for the proximity of our benches, we might not have gotten to know Alain so well and to appreciate his sharp intellect, because we and Alain were all relatively quiet in the setting of larger groups. One day during that year, Antonio decided to give a talk about the subject that was his main interest during his stay at Caltech. We all went to hear him. It was a fascinating and at the same time demoralizing experience for us. Antonio talked about the achaete-scute complex (AS-C) (García-Bellido and Santamaria, 1978; García-Bellido, 1979). He gave a masterful summary of the state of the knowledge and his work. It was mesmerizing to watch and listen to Antonio, his long, non-stop, staccato and sing-song delivery. Our very limited knowledge of fly genetics ill-prepared us for Antonio's sensory onslaught. We were totally overwhelmed by Antonio's talk and the …